The Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) is a relatively brief

self-report A self-report study is a type of survey, questionnaire, or poll in which respondents read the question and select a response by themselves without any outside interference. A ''self-report'' is any method which involves asking a participant ab ...

psychometric instrument (questionnaire) published by the Clinical Assessment division of the Pearson Assessment & Information group. It is designed to

evaluate Evaluation is a systematic determination and assessment of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards. It can assist an organization, program, design, project or any other intervention or initiative ...

a broad range of psychological problems and symptoms of psychopathology. It is also used in measuring the progress and outcome of

psychiatric Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psychiatry. Initial psy ...

and psychological treatments or for research purposes. According to the overview given by the publisher, the SCL-90-R is normed on individuals 13 years and older. It consists of 90 items and takes 12–15 minutes to administer, yielding nine scores along primary symptom dimensions and three scores among global distress indices. The primary symptom dimensions that are assessed are

somatization Somatization is a tendency to experience and communicate psychological distress in the form of bodily and organic symptoms and to seek medical help for them. More commonly expressed, it is the generation of physical symptoms of a psychiatric cond ...

, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression,

anxiety Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different than fear in that the former is defined as the anticipation of a future threat wh ...

hostility Hostility is seen as form of emotionally charged aggressive behavior. In everyday speech it is more commonly used as a synonym for anger and aggression. It appears in several psychological theories. For instance it is a facet of neuroticism in ...

, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation,

psychoticism Psychoticism is one of the three traits used by the psychologist Hans Eysenck in his P–E–N model ( psychoticism, extraversion and neuroticism) model of personality. Nature Psychoticism is conceptually similar to the ''constraint'' factor ...

, and a category of "additional items" which helps clinicians assess other aspect of the clients symptoms (e.g. item 19, " poor appetite"). The three indices are global wellness index, hardiness, and symptom free. A high number of studies have been conducted demonstrating the

reliability Reliability, reliable, or unreliable may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Computing * Data reliability (disambiguation), a property of some disk arrays in computer storage * High availability * Reliability (computer networking), a ...

validity Validity or Valid may refer to: Science/mathematics/statistics: * Validity (logic), a property of a logical argument * Scientific: ** Internal validity, the validity of causal inferences within scientific studies, usually based on experiments ** ...

, and utility of the instrument. It is one of the most widely used measures of psychological distress in clinical practice and research. The Spanish adaptation was made by Luis de Rivera, MD.

References

Checklists Mental disorders screening and assessment tools {{psych-stub